Tiny 3D barcodes on pills help protect patients from fake medicines

By imprinting pills with 3D barcode that is invisible to the naked eye, doctors and patients can tell if a medicine is fake or not, a team of UK engineers said Wednesday at the British Science Festival.

The system is co-developed by engineers from a UK company Sofmat and the University of Bradford. It can give each pill an identification by stamping a series of minuscule pinpricks on it, which is as small as one hundredth of the width of a human hair, according to the engineers.

The barcode can be read by a scanner in the hospitals, which can help doctors to make sure the medicines match the the correct batch and type before giving them to the patients.

The scanning device is expected to be completed by November 2016, and the engineers are working to keep the cost to a viable price of about 200 pounds.

The new system had a more complex mechanism than current anti-counterfeit systems, which can help doctors and pharmaceutical companies to tackle fake medicines, according to Sofmat.

Some ten percent of medicines worldwide could be counterfeit, with two-thirds of pills bought online being either fake or sub-standard, according to the figures from the World Health Organisation.

Sofmat said that companies from Switzerland and China had showed interests in the system and talks of cooperation were underway. Endit